'Wasted meeting': Hungary summit between Trump and Putin canceled

President Donald Trump said Tuesday his plan for a swift meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin was on hold because he didn't want it to be a “waste of time.” It was the latest twist in Trump's stop-and-go effort to resolve the war in Ukraine.

The decision to hold off on the meeting in Budapest, Hungary, which Trump had announced last week, was made following a call Monday between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

“I don’t want to have a wasted meeting,” Trump said. “I don’t want to have a waste of time — so we’ll see what happens.”

Lavrov made clear in public comments Tuesday that Russia is opposed to an immediate ceasefire. Trump, meanwhile, has been shifting his stance all year on key issues in the war, including whether a ceasefire should come before longer-term peace talks, and whether Ukraine could win back land seized by Russia during almost four years of fighting.

Trump's hesitancy in meeting Putin will likely come as a relief to European leaders, who have accused Putin of stalling for time with diplomacy while trying to gain ground on the battlefield.

The leaders — including the British prime minister, French president and German chancellor — said they opposed any push to make Ukraine surrender land captured by Russian forces in return for peace, as Trump most recently has suggested.

They also plan to push forward with plans to use billions of dollars in frozen Russian assets to help fund Ukraine’s war efforts, despite some misgivings about the legality and consequences of such a step.

The U.S. and Russian presidents last met in Alaska in August, but the encounter did not advance Trump’s stalled attempts to end a war that began with Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022.

The Kremlin didn’t seem to be in a rush to get Trump and Putin together again either. Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday that “preparation is needed, serious preparation” before a meeting.

Trump suggested that decisions about the meeting would be made in the coming days.